There may be multiple types of signaling between a serving base station such as a long-term evolution (LTE) base station evolution node B (eNB) and a user equipment (UE). One type of signaling is for the eNB to schedule the UE to perform measurements on a continuous basis and then to report back the measurements while the UE is in an active state. The serving base station may then take actions based on the measurement report or absence of it. This type of signaling may become complicated, because the serving base station may need to interleave the measurements with other tasks and schedule measurement gaps for taking measurements. For example, in case of a VOIP call, the UE may receive and transmit VOIP packets every 20 milliseconds (ms) and execute the measurements between the uplink and downlink allocations indicated to the UE on the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH). In some cases, the UE resources may be fully allocated by the serving base station to transmit data at every transmission time interval (TTI) of radio frames and the UE may not have any gap to take measurements.
Closed subscriber groups (CSGs) may make it more difficult for the UE to complete data transmission and reception using the resources assigned by the serving base station. For example, in addition to performing PDCCH monitoring, measurements and transmission of measurement reports, the UE may need to tune to a CSG broadcast to obtain a master information block (MIB) and a system information block (SIB) in order to verify the identity of the CSG using the SIB. The CSG may be a local wireless network that has a smaller coverage area than a regular cellular cell and may use a standard signaling such as a LTE signaling to communicate with a LTE UE. A CSG base station conforming to LTE standards may be viewed as an eNB. An example CSG is a private enterprise network that may allow a UE to enter its network for a better service quality or other reasons. There may be multiple CSG base stations available for the UE to consider in one location. It may be possible that multiple CSG base stations may be assigned a same physical cell identifier (PCI). The UE may need to verify the true identity of a CSG that the UE considers to enter. In a case of possible confusion about the true identity of the CSG, available processing gaps at the UE may not be sufficient to allow the UE to process the system information from the CSG base station to verify the identity of the CSG base station.
An additional complicating factor for signaling between the UE and the serving base station is that an increasing number of applications may run on the UE. The example of the applications may include a camera application, an office application, a web browsing application, a music application, a navigation application, and the like. These applications along with other processing tasks may make it difficult for the UE to schedule sufficient processing gaps to perform other tasks such as taking measurements.